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                                                                                PHILIPPINES, Page 41

Stepping into Cory's Shoes


As Aquino's presumed successor, Fidel Ramos is short on charisma
and charm. But he just might have the right stuff to do the
job better than she did.

By SANDRA BURTON -- Reported by Jaime A. FlorCruz and Nelly
Sindayen/Manila


    It was not the formal passing of the mantle of office,
but the moment was telling. Front-running presidential
candidate Fidel Ramos was paying a postelection call on outgoing
President Corazon Aquino, whose endorsement was largely
responsible for the slim lead he now holds in the ballot count
of the seven-candidate race. As the pair emerged from their
meeting, the normally deferential former Defense Secretary
confidently stepped forward to field reporters' questions,
leaving Aquino nodding in the background.

    Although the vote tally is still not complete, Ramos is
cautiously staking his claim to office. Voters and political
experts alike, however, still wonder whether Ramos is up to the
job. Acknowledging the sensitive issue of his predecessor's
shortcomings, Ramos has pledged to "improve on the deficiencies
and defects" that marked Aquino's tenure.

    The question is how. As the first Protestant leader of a
predominantly Roman Catholic country, Ramos needs to forge a new
relationship with the church, which remains an important
unifying force in a society riven by social, ethnic and
political divisions. The job demands a felicitous combination
of skill and character, and it is difficult to say whether Ramos
has it. Though he has spent 46 of his 64 years in the public
eye, he remains an enigma to all but a tight circle of relatives
and friends, most of them fellow military men. A West Point
graduate with a degree in civil engineering from the University
of Illinois in the U.S., Ramos is more likely to stupefy
audiences with statistics than stir them with rhetoric. The most
informal thing about him is the cigar he keeps clenched between
his teeth -- and the stogie has not even been fired up since
1987, when he gave up smoking.

    Businessmen hail him as the leader best equipped to
guarantee political and economic stability, but critics claim
that as former commander of the armed forces, he was at least
indirectly responsible for fissures within the military. Ramos'
harshest critics are the victims of the Marcos martial-law
government. Their accusations of torture and harassment at
military hands dogged Ramos throughout the campaign. He
portrayed himself as one of the few officers who were able to
intervene with Marcos to cut prisoners' sentences. Among the
beneficiaries of his intervention was Benigno Aquino, the
outgoing President's late husband, who spent 7 1/2 years in
Marcos jails. "The good guys are behind him," said Aquino of
Ramos shortly before Aquino's 1983 airport assassination. "But
I don't think Ramos will prevail. He has no instinct for
infighting."

    That assessment was incorrect: during the dictator's
overthrow, Ramos showed himself to be a master infighter who
encouraged others, including Marcos, to underestimate him. That
Ramos operated with cold and effective calculation in the
cutthroat Marcos administration and emerged with his "Mr. Clean"
reputation largely intact is his most salient achievement.

    Those same skills served him well as Aquino's crisis
manager, but questions persist about whether Ramos has what it
takes to move beyond mere survival to inspired leadership. As
armed forces Chief of Staff, he correctly assessed the lengthy
insurgency by the communist New People's Army as a political,
rather than military, problem rooted in the rural poverty that
stifles 70% of the population. But Ramos has yet to show that
he can mobilize resources to relieve the country's misery on a
scale that will make a difference.

    Ramos, who was Aquino's Defense Secretary during the early
stages of negotiating a new military-bases agreement with
Washington, shares the blame for loss of the bases and a
corresponding reduction in multilateral aid pledged by Japan and
other U.S. allies. After the Philippine Senate rejected a
provisional accord, Ramos urged the government to delay the U.S.
withdrawal at least until the facilities could be converted for
commercial use. American officials complain, however, that as
soon as Ramos launched his quest for the presidency, he stopped
talking about the touchy issue.

    Ramos argues that once the Senate rejected a new bases
treaty, there was not much he could do about it. After he's in
office, he declared in an interview with TIME, "we will review
the entire range of U.S.-Philippine relations. The rejection of
the bases treaty may have given the wrong signals to our
neighbors, including the U.S. and Japan, that we have become
isolationist, but that's not correct."

    Ramos talks of emulating fellow generals who have wrought
economic miracles in Taiwan and South Korea. Ramos is mindful
that the region's economic miracles were due in part to the
authoritarian control that other leaders exercised while they
effected painful economic reforms, and that it is too late to
impose such measures in the Philippines.

    As a soldier, Ramos has spent a lifetime sizing up
situations quickly and subordinating himself and his men to the
task of working to best advantage within unforgiving
constraints. That background may not lend itself to flights of
rhetoric or legislative imagination, but the fractious
Philippines could do worse than to agree on a set of priorities
and settle down to the tedious task of putting the country back
on its feet.

    And in that context, Ramos may prove to be the right man,
in the right place, for a tough and thankless job.